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AT THE MOVIES

AT THE MOVIES; New Translation For 'Rififi'

By Dave Kehr

Published: July 28, 2000

Correction Appended

Usually, asking a director when he first encountered Stanislavsky is not a question about a literal meeting, but Jules Dassin has a literal answer.

''The man himself? Shall I tell you? It was in 1923, when the producer Morris Guest brought the Moscow Art Theater to New York. I was a boy, and I saw this with my own eyes. John Barrymore was playing 'Hamlet' at that time, and he had heard of Stanislavsky and his great actors. And it seems he cut big chunks out of his 'Hamlet' that night to run and see some of the Moscow Art Theater. He made his entrance still dressed in his inky black Hamlet costume, and rushed up to the stage and kissed the feet of the director and the actors. I saw that!''

Mr. Dassin, a vigorous 89, was in New York recently to introduce the rerelease of ''Rififi,'' the classic caper film he made in France in 1955, after the blacklist forced him to leave Hollywood. ''The title comes from the North African tribe, the Rifs, who were in constant conflict,'' he said. ''So it's all about melees and conflicts and fighting, out of which the novelist Auguste Le Breton made the word 'rififi.'

''He went on to write 'Rififi in Tokyo,' 'Rififi in San Domingo,' 'Rififi in Flatbush' and so on.''

Translating 1950's underworld slang into subtitles for 2000 posed a problem for Mr. Dassin, who worked with Bruce Goldstein (whose company, Rialto Pictures, has released the film in the United States) and the journalist Lenny Borger to create a new English text.

''Breton's characters spoke a very special language, and one unknown to many parts of France outside of the Paris circle,'' Mr. Dassin said. ''When I was given the book to read, I understood nothing of it. It was a very special argot, and I should not be surprised if he invented some of it. To know what the book was about, I had a guy read it to me who was a specialist.''

Mr. Dassin, born in Middletown, Conn., and raised in the Bronx, landed in Europe after the director Edward Dmytryk named him in the hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist influence in Hollywood. Having specialized in film noir in Hollywood (''The Naked City,'' ''Brute Force'') Mr. Dassin returned to the genre for his first film in France, and it became a worldwide hit.

In 1964 he went back to the form for ''Topkapi,'' with its famous high-wire burglary scene -- a sequence that Mr. Dassin was surprised to find re-enacted without acknowledgment in Brian De Palma's 1996 ''Mission: Impossible.'' ''That shocked me,'' he said. ''I think it was just too literal, the same thing. I said, 'Is this allowed?' Apparently it was.''

After shooting ''Rififi'' in Paris, Mr. Dassin discovered Greece, where he met and married the actress Melina Mercouri, who starred in his 1960 film ''Never on Sunday'' as well as ''Topkapi.'' Athens remained his home after her death in 1994. ''I stopped working right after my wife died, to continue on with some of the unfinished projects she undertook when she was the Greek Minister of Culture. We've created a foundation in her name. And I'm trying to get a museum built. There are wonderful educational projects in schools, with fascinating results. That's all my time now.''

The New Zemeckis

One of the handful of Hollywood filmmakers still able to put a personal stamp on his work, Robert Zemeckis made his name with big, broad comedies like ''Back to the Future'' and ''Who Framed Roger Rabbit.'' But since ''Forrest Gump'' in 1994, a more melancholic strain has appeared in his films. His last two features, ''Contact'' (1997) and the current ''What Lies Beneath,'' are both about emotionally isolated women whose attempts to break through to others lead them to relationships, possibly hallucinated, with otherworldly beings.

''Someday, some scholar is going to be able to line up my movies and watch the arc of my life,'' Mr. Zemeckis, 48, said by telephone. ''There's some thread in there about understanding the importance of being able to develop an emotional intimacy with other people, and the wall you come up against from time to time. It's usually within yourself, of course.''

''What Lies Beneath'' is a suspense thriller, ''written in the language of Hitchcock,'' said Mr. Zemeckis, about an unhappy housewife (Michelle Pfeiffer) who finds that an unwelcome entity has joined her marriage with Harrison Ford.

''You begin to understand more complex characters as you build up some years,'' Mr. Zemeckis said. ''I couldn't have made this movie 15 years ago, and I couldn't have made 'Contact.' That's why I think it's important to take these little sabbaticals in between movies. If you're not careful, just making movie after movie can isolate you too. It's a very isolating job; even though you go all over the world and you do all these things, it's a very, very unrealistic way of living.''

There has been no sabbatical for Mr. Zemeckis lately. ''What Lies Beneath'' was made while the director was waiting for Tom Hanks to lose weight and grow a beard for his role as a plane crash survivor living on a desert island in ''Cast Away,'' which is to be released at Christmas.

''We did the first two-thirds of 'Cast Away,' and then we stopped,'' the director said. ''I rolled the crew onto this movie, and then rolled them back on to the end of 'Cast Away,' which is the only way I could have done it, because no one except David Lean could stop the camera for 30 days. No one can afford to do that, so I had to figure out an economical way, and one way was to make a whole other movie.''

For Mr. Zemeckis, ''Cutting for comedy and cutting for jolts is the same. It's all timing, which ultimately comes down to individual frames. It's exactly like leading the audience to the punch line. You can literally be off by half a second and it won't be as effective.''

An Iranian's Themes

Abbas Kiarostami's acclaimed Iranian film ''The Wind Will Carry Us'' opens in New York today (review, Page 7) accompanied by ''Kiarostami 101,'' an instructive 20-minute short assembled by the film scholar Jamsheed Akrami. With brevity and wit, the short sketches out the characteristic themes and images of Mr. Kiarostami's work, which many critics place among the most beautiful being produced today.

Mr. Akrami, who is an associate professor of film at William Paterson University, first wrote about Mr. Kiarostami's work in the early 70's, when the director was making films for Kanun, the Iranian government's Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents. Then came the revolution, and Mr. Akrami found a six-month visit to the United States turning into a 22-year stay.

There's more where these 20 minutes came from. ''When I interviewed Abbas,'' Mr. Akrami said, ''I shot six hours of video, and we only talked about his first two films. There's a lot more to cover.''

Photo: Jules Dassin, whose 1955 film ''Rififi'' is playing in New York. (Associated Press)

Correction: August 1, 2000, Tuesday A brief report in the ''At the Movies'' column in Weekend on Friday about ''Kiarostami 101,'' a short by the film scholar Jamsheed Akrami about the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, misstated plans for it. Mr. Akrami is expanding the short; it is not being shown with Mr. Kia rostami's new film, ''The Wind Will Carry Us,'' at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in Manhattan.